Facebook Adds New 'Page Quality' Information as Part of Measures to Stop Misuse

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As Facebook continues in its efforts to rid its platform of bad actors and misuse, it's introducing a couple of new measures designed to make Page managers more aware of potential rule violations, and limit the capacity for those who do break the rules to maintain the same activity through another outlet.

First off, Facebook's rolling out a new Page tab called 'Page Quality' which will provide Page administrators with insights into any potential rule violations on their Page.

"[Through the Page Quality tab] people who manage a Page will see when we remove certain content that goes against our Community Standards and when we reduce the distribution of posts that have been rated false by a third-party fact-checker."

As shown here, Page Quality will display any content that's been removed due to violation of Facebook's Community Standards, while the second element (in the lower half) relates to content that Facebook's fact-checking processes have found to be false or misleading.

The idea is that this will help better inform Page managers of what they're doing wrong - but there's another particularly interesting consideration to this within Facebook's announcement post.

Right now, Facebook says it's merely letting Pages know of any violations - and, of course, Pages which repeatedly violate the platforms Community Standards can be shut down, so it's definitely something you need to be aware of.

"We’ll be providing more information in the Page Quality tab over time."

That may relate to additional Page elements that could be improved in order to boost organic reach.

Last year, Facebook started testing a new Page rating system, which measures Pages based on a range of considerations, including user reviews and discussion.

It's possible that the Page Quality tab could be extended, over time, to include a range of different elements which businesses need to consider in order to improve their Page performance. That would be a welcome update for Page managers who are looking for ways to offset reach declines - at present, the main focus appears to be detecting bad actors, but the Page Quality tab could end up having broader purpose, and may become a key element in maximizing Facebook performance.

The other new addition is more clearly focused on removing repeat violators - Facebook's also making it harder for banned Pages to continue sharing the same content on another Page they own.

"We’ve long prohibited people from creating new Pages, groups, events, or accounts that look similar to those we’ve previously removed for violating our Community Standards. However, we’ve seen people working to get around our enforcement by using existing Pages that they already manage for the same purpose as the Page we removed for violating our standards. To address this gap, when we remove a Page or group for violating our policies, we may now also remove other Pages and Groups, even if that specific Page or Group has not met the threshold to be unpublished on its own."

Harsh but fair - if you repeatedly break the rules, Facebook can now take away all of your Pages and groups, even if only one of them was the problem.

Facebook says it'll look at a broad set of information - including whether the Page has the same people administering it - when factoring in where to enforce this rule. The update could give Facebook more leeway to remove clusters of questionable accounts before they become problematic - just recently, Facebook removed more than 500 Russian-originated accounts for what it calls 'coordinated inauthentic behavior'.

With this change, it may not need to wait for a full investigation to eliminate such groups.

As noted, the new additions are clearly, at this stage at least, focused on providing more enforcement options for Facebook, while also adding a level of transparency to the process. But the Page Quality tab could become very useful - we'll need to wait to see where Facebook goes with it, and definitely, for those Pages that do break the rules, it will provide immediate assistance. But in future, it could become a key link in helping Pages better understand what they can do to boost their on-platform efforts.